- Cray (CRAY +8.2%) and the U.S. Department of Energy have a new $600M supercomputer contract for the Frontier system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennesse.
- Frontier will have a performance higher than 1.5 exaflops, meaning it's capable of a billion billion calculations/second, and will likely become the world's fastest supercomputer when it debuts in 2021.
- At the heart of Frontier will be custom AMD (AMD -1.3%) EPYC CPU and AMD Radeon Instinct GPU processors in a major data center and high-end computing push for the company.
- AMD rival Intel is currently working with Cray and the DoE on the Aurora system in Chicago, which will have 1 exaflop and is racing Frontier for the 2021 debut.